No-contract smartphone deals easy to find

Sunday

Feb 3, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

One of our readers told us he just bought his first cellphone, after decades without.

He went right past the cheap drug store phones and straight into smartphone territory. The deals right now make it worthwhile. He got a $259 Android smartphone he’s mainly using for Google maps and the Web, paying only $19 a month to Republic Wireless.

Virgin Mobile offers Apple’s iPhone 4 on a no-contract plan. It’s $35 a month for unlimited text and Internet and 300 minutes of talk. But as with all such plans, you have to buy the phone, which in this case is $350.

Our newly savvy reader said he is already thinking of dumping the phone he got from Republic Wireless and getting something better, but he’s looking at other no-contract Android phones, maybe the new Samsung Galaxy. Samsung has sold 100 million of these Galaxy phones since they were introduced in 2010, by the way, and are currently selling 200,000 of their top of the line S3 model every day. (We bought one a week ago.)

Several years ago, Bob was browsing Amazon’s online music store and ended up putting two dozen classical CDs in the shopping cart. He planned to look the list over again before going to check-out. But Joy surprised him and just bought the whole batch. Yesterday, all of those CDs popped up online, ready to play from any computer, tablet or phone.

Amazon’s new AutoRip, is a free service that automatically uploads any CD you bought from them, going all the way back to 1998. It puts the contents into your personal Cloud Player ready to stream online. We are more than slightly awed by this; just consider the amount of storage they must have.

A playlist online is much easier to handle than riffling through boxes of CDs and loading them into a player. Before AutoRip arrived, most of our CDs gathered dust; we just listened to Spotify and Pandora online radio.

Now, Bob’s classical albums and Joy’s show tunes and rock classics are all neatly categorized by type, arranged automatically by Amazon. (Our CD of a rainstorm was put under “New Age.”) Anyone who signs onto this storage service could sell or give away their CDs and still have the music. This is certainly going to kill the used CD market.

Besides CDs, any song you buy from Amazon is also available in their Cloud Player. They will also take music from CDs you bought elsewhere. Amazon lets you store 250 imported songs for free, or 250,000 songs for $25 a year. Amazon sells 20 million songs, some of them from vinyl records. (Bob wanted to buy “Abdul the BulBul Emir,” but the only version they had was dreadful.)

Our new Galaxy S3 phone has a removable battery. So rather than carry a charger or a cable to plug into a wall outlet, we carry an extra battery. But most smartphones and tablets don’t have this option.

For these, we tried out MyCharge, a battery pack that has different connecting cords permanently attached. Every kind of cord you might need to plug into the charging port of a phone or tablet is attached to their most expensive charger (and a couple of the most common cords even with their cheapest charger). The battery pack itself is about half an inch longer than a phone and about twice as thick.

There are four kinds of MyCharge products, ranging from $28 to $89. The top-of-the line unit charges the greatest variety of devices and provides 27 hours of extra charge. The cheaper versions charge for four hours and have two connecting cords.

Yidio is free at Yidio.com and sends you a reminder when something you want to watch is on TV and gives you a description of the episode. If you forget to record it, Yidio provides a link to where you can watch it online.

For example, we like to watch “60 Minutes” and “The Mentalist,” and though these shows are automatically set to record on our cable box, Yideo told us where to find them online. For instance, “The Mentalist” is available free on the CBS website a day after it airs, or for a fee on iTunes and Amazon.

Most people who get audiobooks from Audible.com only listen to one or two, yet pay $25 a month for unlimited access to more than 100,000 titles. AudioBooks.com has a much smaller library: just 25,000. But they’ve come out with a $15-a-month plan for one audiobook at a time.

If you only want a three- month trial membership, Audible, at $7.49 a month, is still the better deal. After that, AudioBooks is cheaper.

We like to listen to nature sounds from a box as we go to sleep. A “sleep phone” from SleepPhones.com is a kind of headset for people who want to listen to something without disturbing their partner and without uncomfortable ear buds.

Described as “pajamas for the ears,” sleep phones are basically a headphone wrapped in fleece. Currently, they connect to your phone with a wire, but a wireless version is coming out in April. We saw them for $30 at discounters.

A new book in the “Dummies” series is “iPad Apps for Kids,” by Jinny Gudmundsen, $20 from Dummies.com. Here are a few of its recommendations for kids. All are free.

Toontastic is the best app we tried. It walks you through the creation of an animated cartoon, adding movable characters to the scene you create. In the process, it teaches kids how to compose a story: the setup, conflict, a challenge, a climax and finally a resolution to the drama.

Monster Hunt is a good memory game for adults and kids. Four great-looking monsters flash for an instant on a grid and disappear. You tap the squares where you think they were. Then it’s on to five monsters, six, etc. We got up to 10 before defeat.

Let’s Color gives you scenes to color. Clicking “go” makes them come alive, with stuff spraying out of an elephant’s trunk, trains chugging with passengers, and so on.

Alien Assignment for iPad 2 and up (or iPod Touch) requires a device with a camera. Children go on a scavenger hunt, taking pictures of the things they need, such as “something to clean with” or “something to use in the rain.” The story line is you’re helping an alien family who crash-landed on Earth.